The galaxy cluster is estimated to be about 9.9 billion light years away

May 22, 2014 20:17 GMT  ·  By

In a recent paper in The Astrophysical Journal, scientist Andrew Newman with the Carnegie Institution in the United States and fellow researchers confirm the presence of a galaxy cluster some 9.9 billion light years away.

The galaxy cluster is known to the scientific community as JKCS 041, and an image of it pieced together with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope is available above.

As detailed on the official website for the Carnegie Institution, this cluster encompasses both galaxies that are still forming stars and galaxies that are no longer active in terms of star formation.

The first are marked by means of blue circles in the image above, whereas the latter are marked by yellow circles, Andre Newman and his colleagues explain.

The Carnegie Institution scientist and his fellow researchers estimate that the galaxies in this cluster are about 10 billion years old. It appears that some of them had already stopped forming new stars by the time they were just 1 billion years old.

Specialists hope that, by further studying JKCS 041, they will gain a better understanding of the makeup of massive galaxies and how such structures form and change in time.

“Because JKCS 041 is the most-distant known cluster of its size, it gives us a unique opportunity to study these old galaxies in detail and better understand their origins,” Andrew Newman explains.

In their paper in The Astrophysical Journal, the researchers detail that, despite the fact that they have been studying JKCS 041 since 2006, it was only recently that they managed to confirm that the structure was in fact a galaxy cluster.

The confirmation came when they pinned down as many as 19 galaxies located at the same distance of 9.9 billion light years, a feature that the specialists claim indicates the existence of a cluster.

In order to determine the location of these galaxies, scientists observed them with the help of several telescopes. Of these, the Hubble Space Telescope served to analyze the light originating from them.

The Chandra X-ray Observatory was also used to research this structure during a previous investigation, and information obtained with its help led to the discovery of X-ray emissions in the location of JKCS 041.

Scientists are yet to confirm this, but they suspect that these X-ray emissions originate from gas that were heated to temperatures of up to 80 million degrees.

“Our observations make this galaxy cluster one of the best-studied structures from the early universe,” specialist Andrew Newman has wished to stress during a recent interview.